A native of pre-Cumberland-Dam Burnside, Kentucky, who, from her
late teens through her early thirties, taught in a one-room school
in rural Pulaski County, served an apprenticeship as a writer
in Cincinnati, tried subsistence farming on the Big South Ford
of the Cumberland, and finally moved to Detroit in 1944, Harriette
Simpson Arnow came naturally to the subject matter of her best-known
novel, The Dollmaker. Published in 1954, The Dollmaker
chronicles the lives of Kentucky's isolated hill residents and
their eventual exodus from the mountains during the "Great
Migration" to the industrial North during World War II. Arnow
evokes the theme of dislocation with such force in The Dollmaker
that most recent criticism of her fiction has centered on the
novel's powerfully-rendered urban segment and on the issues raised
by the physical and psychic displacement of Gertie Nevels, the
self-reliant hill woman who finds herself painfully ill-prepared
to cope with the dangers and complexities of an urban existence.
Such a focus proves hardly surprising -- or unwarranted -- give
Arnow's graphic depiction of an almost demonic industrial Detroit,
but a concentration on Gertie as victim of the city can obscure
our understanding of one of the most important issues the novel
raises. In The Dollmaker -- and, in fact, in much of her
best work -- Harriette Arnow sets forth a complex, coherent, and
largely unexamined vision of life in the hill country of southeastern
Kentucky during the first half of the twentieth century and her
vision not only evokes the natural beauty of the region and the
innate dignity of its inhabitants, but also carefully depicts
the forces -- internal and external -- contributing to the ultimate
demise of an agriculturally based and highly distinctive mountain
existence.

Arnow develops her portrait of twentieth-century mountain life
in her first two novels, Mountain Path (1936) and Hunter's
Horn (1949), as well as in The Dollmaker. Set in the
late twenties, late thirties to early forties, and mid-forties,
respectively, the three novels paint a fairly consistent picture
of life in the hills of southeastern Kentucky: isolation, poverty,
illiteracy, even moonshining and violence, exist alongside a rich
and intimate involvement with nature and an immediate, fulfilling
relationship to the daily experience of living. As Arnow notes
in the Introduction to the 1963 re-issue of Mountain Path,
"for those who like open fires, hounds, children, human talk
and song instead of TV and radio, the wisdom of the old who had
seen all of life from birth to death, none of it hidden behind
institutional walls, there was a richness of human life and dignity
[in the pre-World War II Kentucky mountains] seldom found in the
United States today." Arnow's novels also present, however,
a growing tension between this way of life and the demands of
a modern world, a tension which culminates in the Kentucky portion
of The Dollmaker. In these opening nine chapters, on which
I would like to concentrate, Arnow argues that mid-twentieth-century
subsistence farmers like Gertie Nevels can no longer maintain
their traditional manner of living, not only because the war has
intruded into their world, but also because agriculture, as they
conceive of and practice it, can no longer sustain them and their
families.

To understand Arnow's analysis of mountain life, then, we must
first understand Gertie's distinctively American conception of
the land and of agriculture, a conception suggested by certain
of her firmly-held (although seldom articulated) beliefs and assumptions
about her world. Probably the most striking of these is a belief
in the goodness and beneficence of nature, a belief made clear
by a scene early in The Dollmaker. In this scene, a self-confident
and contented Gertie, surrounded by her children, serves a generous
dinner of cornbread, hominy, shuck beans, sweet potatoes, cucumber
pickles, milk, and green tomato ketchup "with pride, for
everything, even the meal in the bread, was a product of her farming"
(91). And although Gertie works the land to insure her family's
survival, she loves and understands it as well; on more than one
occasion, she refuses to cut healthy trees or branches when "crooked"
or damaged one will suffice (55, 137).

Closely tied to Gertie's love for and reliance on the natural
world is her desire to possess and work her own land, a desire
she characteristically sees in Biblical terms: "[h]er foundation
was not God but what God had promised Moses -- land" (127-8).
For fifteen years Gertie has scraped together money to purchase
a farm and thus free her family from the economic bondage of sharecropping;
as the novel opens, she has saved $310 toward the purchase of
the Tipton Place, a deserted homestead adjacent to her father's.
Gertie carries her savings in the lining of an old coat, beneath
a torn pocket, and she takes the bills out and counts them while
waiting for her son to recover from diphtheria at a small town
doctor's office:

Some were folded alone into tiny squares, others were folded two
and three together, and many, like the four new [ones] were crumpled
hastily into tiny balls. Each she unfolded and smoothed flat on
the floor with the palm of her hand, looking at it an instant
with first a search, then a remembering glance. Sometimes after
a moment of puzzlement she whispered, "That was eggs at Samuel's
two years ago last July," and to a five, "That was the
walnut-kernel money winter before last," and to another one,
"That was the big dominecker that wouldn't lay atall; she'd
bring close to two dollars now." Of one so old and thin it
seemed ready to fall apart at the creases, she was doubtful, and
she held it to the light until she saw a pinhole through Lincoln's
eye. "Molasses money." (41)

In this passage, Arnow makes clear that, to Gertie, every piece
of currency she possesses represents the concrete reward for something
as tangible as the land she wants to buy; or, to put it in a more
sophisticated manner, Gertie's response to her savings reveals
a pre-industrial conception of money, a conception far removed
(then and now) from the prevalent wage-earner mentality. Money,
as Gertie sees it, comes not from one's labor, but from the produce
of one's labor, specifically of one's farming.

Taken together, these details suggest that Arnow goes to some
lengths in The Dollmaker to create a mid-twentieth-century
protagonist who embodies in a surprisingly pure form the Jeffersonian
ideal of the small yeoman farmer working not for wages but for
the produce of the land and deriving not only economic independence
but also spiritual and moral compensation from his -- in this
case her -- close relationship to the natural world. And while
Gertie would not think of her love of the land, her desire to
own a piece of it, and her conception of money as agrarian or
pre-industrial, the opening chapters of The Dollmaker associate
her assumptions and beliefs -- and, by implication, those of other
hill farmers -- with precisely these modes of American thought.

This early association proves a key one for the reading of the
novel's Detroit chapters because it suggests that the story of
Gertie's displacement has ramifications beyond the personal, that
the narrative of her dislocation both dramatizes the individual's
loss of a close relationship to nature and exposes the vulnerability
of a traditional -- and largely American -- mode of thought. Most
readers, however, overlook the fact that the Kentucky chapters
also question the viability of Gertie's dream of a self-sustaining
life on the land. Even in Kentucky, Gertie needs more cash than
her farming can provide; she has no money to buy shoes or eyeglasses
for five-year-old Cassie, and after fifteen years of harsh economizing
(prior to her brother Henley's unexpected bequest), she has only
about half the amount necessary to purchase the Tipton Place.
Despite Gertie's assumptions to the contrary, then, her rural
world does not remain insulated from the demands of a modern dollar
economy, and, although her farming may provide generous meals,
it cannot provide for her family's physical needs. Ironically,
it does not even provide the funds necessary for them to obtain
their own land.

Arnow had already dramatized the need for what she sometimes called,
in the vernacular of the hills, "cash money," since
the male characters of both Mountain Path and Hunter's
Horn turn to moonshining as a way to convert their corn crops
to readily available cash. Arnow acknowledged, in fact, the ever-present
need of money as the single most compelling reason for migration
from the Kentucky mountains, commenting in the introduction to
Mountain Path that the post-World War II depletion of the
region's population occurred because "some means of earning
cash . . . never came to the back hill community." Arnow goes
a step further in The Dollmaker, however, and not only
dramatizes the need for cash, but also portrays the striking alienation
of a genuine farmer like Gertie Nevels from any means of earning
it, other than by selling the surplus produce of her farming.
Gertie and her way of life seem trapped, therefore, in an inescapable
paradox. On the one hand, the agriculturally dependent mountaineer
accepts a pure sense of agrarian economics and attempts to live
entirely from the land; on the other hand, the modern world insists
that its inhabitants -- whether they live in rural Kentucky or
industrial Detroit -- earn money in some other, non-agricultural
manner.

Most of the residents of Gertie's Kentucky had succumbed to the
need for cash -- or to the demands of war -- prior to the opening
of The Dollmaker; the older men had pursued the "big
money" to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Gary, Indiana, Hampton Roads,
Virginia, or some other incarnation of the war-time industrial
city, while the war had scattered the younger men throughout Europe
and the Pacific. The wonderfully realized scene at the Ballew,
Kentucky, general store and post-office rendered in chapters six
and seven of The Dollmaker can, in fact, almost stand alone
as Arnow's comment on rural Kentucky after the beginning of World
War II. In this scene, Arnow reveals that virtually all the male
members of the community -- including several characters from
Hunter's Horn -- have left the region. The compassionate
and forgiving Samuel Hull has exchanged preaching for defense
work, leaving the people with only the ministrations of the fiery,
hell-evoking fundamentalist, Battle John Brand; Lester Tucker
and Jaw Buster Miller (Anderson in Hunter's Horn) have
taken their families and gone North; and eighteen-year-old Andy
Hull is fighting in France. Of the remaining members of the community
present in these chapters, moreover, only the elderly seem to
share Gertie's strong commitment to the land and agriculture.
These people, old men and women like John Ballew and Gertie's
mother-in-law Aunt Kath, can no longer effectively farm their
property, but they have no children willing to assume the difficult
and often unremunerative task -- witness Clovis Nevels' preference
for Detroit over the Cumberland and John Ballew's rather pathetic
wish that Gertie could replace his own absent sons and daughters
(112).

Viewed against this backdrop, Gertie appears as something of an
anomaly even within the Kentucky hills. Her aspirations toward
a life on the land seem strangely out of keeping with those of
the younger people around her and with her particular historical
period -- the period during which, Arnow consistently argues,
the need for cash and the sudden availability of jobs outside
the area drove increasing numbers of people away from their isolated
Kentucky farms and from their traditional, agriculturally-based
way of life.

Arnow's point about the demise of agriculture seems borne out
late in the novel when Gertie can imagine no future for her run-away
son, Reuben, except in the coal mines or a factory (564), but
a sense of the movement away from farming also pervades The
Dollmaker's opening chapters. In these chapters, ironically,
the characters who treasure the old way of life most often give
voice, albeit unconsciously, to its decline. When Gertie tells
Reuben, for instance, that "[y]our great-great-granpa Kendrick
owned all th land tween here an the ridge road clean down to th
river an up to th head a th creek -- nigh onto four thousand acres,"
the reader can hardly ignore the fact that Grandpa Kendrick's
descendants own nothing (59). Nor can a reader easily ignore the
implications of Aunt Kate's prophetic warning to Gertie: "if'n
you follow [Clovis to Detroit] he might never come back"
(125). For Arnow, people did not return to the farm after the
"Great Migration."

A final intriguing detail from The Dollmaker's early chapters
demonstrates Arnow's conception of the pervasiveness of change
in the Kentucky mountains. As the remaining members of the community
wait for letters from their absent relatives, Mrs. Hull reveals,
almost in an aside, that Nunnely D. Ballew has left the area (124).
The fox-hunting and subsistence-farming protagonist of Hunter's
Horn, Nunn Ballew shares Gertie Nevels' love of the land and
her commitment to life in the hills; at the end of Hunter's
Horn, both his commitment to his Kentucky farm and his economic
ability to sustain it seem, despite a severe personal crisis,
stronger than at any other point in the novel. Unlike his neighbors
-- and unlike Gertie, for that matter -- Nunn also seems relatively
immune to any obvious pressure to migrate. At thirty-five in 1941,
he would probably be ineligible for military service; a natural
farmer with a strong aversion to machinery, he does not desire
a high-paying job in the North -- late in Hunter's Horn,
in fact, Nunn comments that he'd "rather be in th fighten
than shut up in a factory" (518). There is, then, no clear
motivation for Nunn Ballew to forsake the land and the way of
life he loves; his disappearance from the Kentucky hills suggests
that Arnow views the dream of a self-sustaining life on the land
-- no matter how dedicated the dreamer -- as largely unattainable.

This reading should not suggest that Arnow undervalues or disparages
the way of life espoused by Gertie Nevels and Nunn Ballews of
her fiction, for she clearly prefers the values and traditions
of the Kentucky mountains embodied in these characters to the
chaos and materialism she sees as characteristic of the modern
urban world. By the time she wrote The Dollmaker, however,
Arnow saw the life of the self-sufficient Kentucky subsistence
farmer as primarily a thing of the past; in her view, the need
for cash had driven the people from the land and had made wage-oriented
jobs outside the mountains increasingly attractive. Arnow does
not, in other words, suggest that Gertie's dream of a life on
the land can be workable so long as she stays in the rural world
of Kentucky, nor does she set up a relatively simplistic dichotomy
between an edenic, pastoral world and a hellish, industrial one--
both of which mistaken assumptions are implicit in many critical
essays on The Dollmaker. Finally, Arnow does not indicate
that Gertie could return to her previous way of life at some future
point -- an assumption explicit in the ending of the popular Jane
Fonda film based on the novel. Instead, Arnow present in The
Dollmaker a complex, unsentimental, and astute vision of the
demise of mountain life, and her perceptive treatment of the issue
should not surprise us. She was, after all, a student of southeastern
Kentucky's history, folklore, and sociology, as well as a writer
of its fiction.

Notes

There are, however, some notable exceptions. Lee R. Edwards,
for instance, recognizes the war's intrusion into Kentucky, and
identifies the "naiveté of Gertie's wish to maintain
herself, her family, and her community outside the war's axis,
immune from the encroachments of a very different world. A futile
dream, her vision is also self-deceptive" (222). According
to Joan Griffin, "by the time of Gert's leaving [Kentucky],
if not before it, hill culture as a system of life and the hill
community have been virtually destroyed by the combination of
war and technology" (112).

Arnow uses the term "cash money" in the introduction
to Mountain Path. In that text, she also provides a very tolerant
-- and interesting -- view of moonshining, one consistent with
my analysis: "It was the only way for the farmer to change
a raw product into a manufactured article and so make a little
extra money with his work."